Anti-pattern theater: how to get women to quit

It seems a bit boring to keep talking about things in terms of "how do
you get women on your team" or "how do you keep them on your team".
Let's mix it up a little and play it as an anti-pattern instead this
time.

How do you piss off a technical woman so she will leave your team? It's
easy. Just go and lob a few complaints about her behavior that would
never apply to a guy. The easiest one of these is to say "you're being
too emotional". Who's going to argue against that? All you have to do
is find places where she emphasizes things instead of remaining in a
flat monotone and you hit paydirt.

It doesn't even have to exist! You can totally claim it's happening
just because you think it'll still work. Here's how.

It's Monday morning in California, and it's time for the weekly
production meeting. Meanwhile, you're in Dublin visiting the other half
of the team, and it's getting late in the day there. You get to witness
the following interaction between your team's boss (B) and the one woman
(W) on the team.

B: So I was looking at the pages from this weekend and it looks like we
had something bad on Saturday. What happened?

W: Too many queries were failing in the Netherlands.

B: Why were they failing?

W: The new authentication daemon on the machines has a bug where it
locks up after it runs too long.

B: How do you know this?

W: After it woke me up for the fifth time, I got out of bed and
troubleshot the whole stack down to this daemon and proved it by
restarting one, at which point everything started working again.

B: What did you do about it?

W: I wrote something to restart the daemon before it can run that
long until we get a patch.

B: When did this start?

W: Before my shift.

B: Who was on call then?

W: S.

B: What happened on his shift?

W: He rebooted the machines and it stopped happening for a while.

B: Is that it?

W: Yes.

B: How do you know that?

W: I talked to T and he said he had talked to S during that shift, and
that was their conclusion: reboot it, and it goes away.

It's a very bizarre and stunted conversation. The woman is clearly
going to great lengths to not elaborate. She's answering things as
succinctly as possible so as not to give you any way to claim that she's
being emotional. It doesn't matter! You can still play that card!

Here's what you do. After the meeting, you get her on chat and you say
"wow, you were really hard on S". It doesn't matter that she was
answering direct questions posed by the boss and had to answer them.
The more you accuse, the more it becomes true, so stay at it!

If you're lucky, she'll get fed up and go somewhere else. That'll let
you relax again and enjoy the good life. Who needs the stress of having
a woman around on your team?

For those following along at home, I was the "W" in that conversation,
and it really happened just like that. This was the Monday production
meeting after the
Saturday fail-fest
in question.

I knew it was going to be a disaster and they'd use it against me, so I
talked to some friends over the weekend and came up with a plan: I was
going to be cold and dry and only answer exactly what was asked of me.
I would not elaborate or speculate or anything else of the sort. That
had to work!

So the meeting started, and we went through it just like that, and sure
enough, afterward, one of the guys who was visiting the remote office
that week said that "I was being hard on S". This, after having gone to
ridiculous lengths to not do anything overly "mean" or whatever, was the
final straw. I started looking for a new team later that week.

They "won", in as much as they got rid of me.

Of course, they still didn't know what they were doing, and they had to
keep coming to me for technical assistance months after the fact. I
finally had to raise this with their manager (my old boss). I put it
like this: "I don't know how to say this, but I don't want you to get
the idea that your staffing levels are adequate, because clearly they
are not". If they have to come to me, something is very wrong.

His response was approximately "everyone has different abilities, and
some things are as high as they are going to get", which to me says
"they hit max level, and it's below the point where they can actually
handle running things". It was pretty damning stuff, and I'm surprised
he said it.

Within six months, they had an actual user-affecting outage directly
attributed to things on that team. We hadn't had any of them during my
tenure running that service. Some of the services which relied on us
had actually delivered 100% uptime for several quarters thanks in part
to our solid-as-a-rock service level. Then this happened. A few weeks
later, it happened again. I'm talking about the kind of thing where
every single news agency starts writing gloom and doom stories about
"the cloud". It was big.

Talk about a mixed bag. On one hand, you're proven right. On the
other, you realize the whole company's reputation is being tarnished by
these outages, and that still reflects on you. You can laugh it up but
you're still affected by it.